


these tangled waters that roil and churn

by 100indecisions



Category: Doctrine of Labyrinths - Sarah Monette
Genre: Book 4: Corambis, Drowning, Gen, Harm to Children, Magic, Malkar only appears in a dream/flashback, Missing Scene, Nightmares, Okay Not Really, Past Rape/Non-con, but it's worth a shot, i mean i guess, in canon in the past, is there a specific place where this could slot into canon? I have no idea, tea fixes everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-04-21 17:01:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22096507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/100indecisions/pseuds/100indecisions
Summary: Felix dreams. The binding-by-obedience doesn't help.
Relationships: Malkar Gennadion/Felix Harrowgate, Mildmay Foxe & Felix Harrowgate
Comments: 6
Kudos: 31
Collections: New Year's Resolutions 2020





	these tangled waters that roil and churn

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lise/gifts).

> Once again I really really meant to get this done in time for a Yuletide treat or Yuletide Madness, because it was short and almost finished, and then I figured I could at least get it done before the end of Hanukkah. Clearly, neither of those things happened. So, uh, happy late Hanukkah and late New Year I guess?

I told myself it was not so bad, living under the choke-binding. I told the virtuers on the rare occasions any of them asked, insisted the same more strenuously to Mildmay. I believed it myself, most of the time, especially after he forced me to confront the truth that it was a pain I had chosen. But at night, when I woke gasping from dreams that should have been ordinary, dreams that the fantôme hadn’t invaded—

I dreamed of drowning, still. Crushing darkness and breathless agony as the Sim flooded my lungs. Dreamed of Malkar, too, breaking the Virtu by breaking me, and it felt almost the same, an overpowering malevolent force invading me body and soul and destroying me from within. I could control it, more often than not, and redirect my nightmares into my construct-Melúsine; I had done so for many years now. Under the binding-by-obedience, it was more often…not. My magic always, always knew it was suffocating, and in my dreams and the halfway state between sleep and waking, my mind and body couldn’t tell the difference.

I didn’t tell Mildmay. There was nothing he could do, realistically, and if he went after the virtuers again, he would be the one to pay for it. But the terrible part was, I wanted to. I wanted to tell him, because even without the obligation d’âme, I thought he might well react by trying to rip out their throats with his teeth, and I—

I wanted to see him try, to _see_ he was still that loyal to me on his own even when I couldn’t help doubting his words. I hated myself for wanting it, as if my brother was little more than a vicious dog who would attack at my command, and I knew it was the same part of me that abused the binding when I had it, and I wanted it anyway.

I _didn’t_ want to hurt Mildmay. I was determined not to force him into another situation in which he would be hurt on my behalf (even if the virtuers might show him more mercy than Malkar did, which is to say any at all). If I couldn’t help wanting the wrong thing, I could at least refuse to act on it. But even there I was selfish. The better reason was that I needed to protect Mildmay from myself. The shameful, craven reason was that I did not want to give in to my worse impulses only to learn that without the binding, Mildmay wouldn’t truly care enough to be angry.

So I said nothing about the nightmares, and I tried to stay quiet when I woke up during the night and couldn’t get back to sleep. I knew I was slower, often distracted, on mornings that I slept badly; I was also aware that my moods could be mercurial under the best of circumstances, and I was grateful for that now, in an ashamed sort of way. I might well be the only one to notice any difference.

I probably should have known better than to think Mildmay wouldn’t notice on his own. He slept far more lightly than I did, for one thing—and even now, even for me, it was easy to forget that his taciturn nature hid an intensely observant, perceptive mind.

The morning after a particularly bad night, when I’d jolted awake from dreams of Joline dying in my arms and spent the next few hours staring at the ceiling with the taste of smoke burning my throat, he finally broached the subject over breakfast.

“It’s getting worse, ain’t it,” he said. I must have looked blank, because he clarified, “The nightmares.”

I should have expected it, should’ve had an excuse ready, and I didn’t. I snapped, “How would _you _know?”

Mildmay gave me quite possibly the flattest, most unimpressed look I’d ever seen. “I ain’t blind.”

_More’s the pity_, I almost said, or _Darling, you’ve no _idea_ how blind you are_, but I managed to swallow the words back. Instead I said, “_Am not_, and I cannot imagine why you would consider that your business,” which wasn’t much better.

One eyebrow twitched upward, but otherwise his expression didn’t change, and he let the subject go with a shrug. I had no illusions that he’d dropped it entirely, but I resolved to be more careful.

The nightmares had other ideas, of course.

* * *

_I am small and weak and terrified, because Keeper is angry and I know what that means. He hauls me into the basement and thrusts me under the water, and my frantic struggles are worse than useless because I’m just using up my air faster but I can’t stop, lungs burning, hands striking out against Keeper’s immovable arms. I can still see his face through the water, blurry and indistinct but I know he’s smiling and he leans in harder, fingers squeezing tight enough on my shoulders that the shock of pain pierces even the panic of drowning._

_Keeper smiles as I thrash under him, smiles as I take my first awful gasp of the Sim, smiles. And then it isn’t Keeper anymore but Malkar, or both at once, still holding me under but now it’s Malkar’s workroom and the water drains away as I register the presence of shackles on my wrists and ankles. Malkar has me pinned like a butterfly in a case, and he smiles as I gasp for breath so desperately I think I feel my ribs crack, and I cannot look away from him._

_Malkar’s workroom is cold and damp, water trickling over stone somewhere, my hair still soaked and clinging to my scalp. Malkar brushes the long strands away from my face in a parody of tenderness that makes me shudder, and then he thrusts into me like a battering ram. _

_Between his weight on top of me and the shackles biting my skin, I can’t fight him, can’t even move as he rips me apart. I can’t breathe for the pain of it, inside and out, his magic invading me again and crushing everything inside me._

_The workroom begins to flood and the Sim closes over my head once more, the stone throbbing under my spine like the ticking of a giant clock. I can’t breathe and everything is agony, and all I can see as my vision goes dark is Malkar’s teeth gleaming as he grins—_

* * *

“Felix,” a voice was saying. Not Keeper’s, not Malkar’s. “_Felix_. Wake the fuck up and listen to me.”

I jerked back, still gasping for air, only—I couldn’t, there was _nothing_, just the feeling of a giant fist squeezing my lungs and heart. “I can’t, I can’t breathe, I—”

“Fuck me sideways,” the voice muttered, and then there was a hand on my arm and a face swimming in my vision, red hair and a twisted scar, and he said urgently, “You can. You ain’t—_there_. You ain’t drowning. You’re here in Corambis with me. Remember? You been teaching me to read, and trying to get the kids at the college to actually think about shit, and—look, you can feel it, you’re in bed. Kind of a shitty bed compared to all that flash stuff you had at the Mirador, but at least it ain’t a bedroll in the dirt. Okay? You feel that?”

The breath escaped me in a rush. When I inhaled again it wasn’t enough, everything still hurt, but I was breathing and that was something.

“Mildmay,” I said, hoarse. The sheets under me were damp and cold with sweat, and my nightshirt was almost drenched, clinging to me in a way that threatened my tenuous grasp on reality. But the bed was firm and solid under me, the blanket scratchy when I curled my fist into it, my brother’s gaze focused and intense, and all of that seemed real enough. I remembered, finally, the binding that was stifling my magic, and I had to gulp back a burst of hysterical laughter.

“Yeah,” he said. “You back yet?”

I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak again.

“Okay.” He sat back, considering. “Want some tea?”

I shrugged instead of nodding again. He huffed out something like a laugh before limping over to our tiny kitchen area and putting the kettle on to boil. More than any restorative properties of the tea, I was just grateful for a moment to collect myself. It didn’t really help, of course; I was no closer to knowing what to say by the time he came back and sat across from me on his bed.

“So,” Mildmay said, and paused. I said nothing, because I didn’t particularly want to help him. After a moment he said, in the exact same tone as he’d used earlier, “The nightmares are getting worse. Ain’t they.”

He was still staring at me, tense as a bowstring, and I didn’t have the energy to tell him anything but the truth. “It would seem so.”

“So is it—” He hesitated, clearly choosing his words carefully. “The fantôme ain’t getting stronger, is it?”

Well, it was considerate of him not to say _is it wearing you down_ or something similar like he probably wanted to. “No, it’s…contained, at least for the time being.”

He relaxed a little. “Okay. So?” I hesitated again and his frown grew. “Felix, for fuck’s sake, just spit it out. I can’t help you if you never _tell _me nothing.”

Yes, of course, because poor crazy Felix was utterly incapable by himself. “_Anything_, darling,” I said, “and as _charming_ as it is when you assume your particular talents can fix every situation in which I might find myself, quite often what you can contribute is, in fact, nothing.”

Mildmay’s expression slammed closed. “Right,” he said, grabbing Jashuki to get to his feet again.

I could tell myself as much as I liked that I didn’t want to hurt him but that was what I _did_, even when I meant to be better. “Wait,” I said, before I could stop myself. “That was—unnecessary.”

“No shit,” Mildmay said, but he let go of the cane. His gaze sharpened. “Is it the choke-binding?”

“What?” I said stupidly. The fact that he’d noticed the worsening nightmares was one thing. That he would immediately pinpoint the cause—

He shrugged. “Figure they call it that for a reason. You said you couldn’t breathe.”

“It’s metaphorical,” I said, almost automatically.

Mildmay almost rolled his eyes. “All magic is metaphor. Right?”

Of course he would remember exactly when I’d rather he didn’t. I looked down at my hands, twisting in my lap like they belonged to someone else, and forced them to still.

“That drug you took in Bernatha,” Mildmay said. “Did it feel like this too?”

“Hecate, by its nature, is temporary. That alone makes it different.”

“Sure. But did it?”

I sighed. “The sensation was…not dissimilar, if less severe.”

“Well,” Mildmay said, mostly under his breath. “Shit.”

“One might argue that I deserve it, given that I haven’t shown the most responsibility with my abilities.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, maybe. Ain’t what I’d say, though.”

“If _anyone_ has cause to complain that I’ve abused my powers—”

“Still don’t make it right,” he said. “Taking away something that’s part of you—it’s fucked up, that’s all.”

It wasn’t the violent anger I’d somewhat expected and shamefully half-wanted, because he was more than smart enough to recognize a pointless effort. But there was anger, still, and more than that his plain insistence in the wrongness of the binding was…grounding. Reassuring.

“Well,” I said, and then I said nothing, because I could think of nothing to say.

“You wanna talk about it?”

“Not particularly.”

He snorted and hauled himself back to his feet. “You going back to sleep?”

I considered the idea very briefly and couldn’t repress a shiver. “No.”

“Okay,” he said. “You want to drink tea and listen to me try to read?”

I blinked at him. “You need to sleep too.”

“Nah, I’m good,” he said, which probably meant he was avoiding nightmares too. Coward that I was, fresh off my own nightmares and knowing how many of his only plagued him because me, I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

“Yes,” I said finally. “If you want to.”

“I offered,” he said, with one of those expressions that was almost a smile, and something inside me untwisted a little at the sight. I thought sometimes that it should terrify me for anyone to have the power over me that my instinctive trust gave them, but when it was Mildmay—well, it was only fair, for one, and he had earned my trust many times over (as I had only occasionally earned his).

I got the kettle, deciding it was the least I could do, and he joined me at the table with a book on Corambin history that was proving to be educational for both of us (and, for the most part, not unbearably dry). Mildmay glanced at my still-trembling hands and poured for both of us before opening to a section on recent history and beginning to read. He was gaining confidence, stumbling over the words less, and it warmed me to hear it even as the dream’s remnants clung to me. In this one way, at least, I had done right by my brother.

I curled both hands around my cup and breathed. It was…good, somehow. Darkness pressed against the windows and pressed against my mind, and even Mildmay with all his bullheadedness couldn’t stop either one, but this small quiet moment of steaming tea and my brother’s voice—it was good. Maybe, in time, it could even be enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly don't know if there's a place in canon where this quite fits, for a variety of reasons (for one thing, I can't remember _at all_ when or even if Mildmay learned about the fantôme), but I decided I liked the concept more than I liked knowing it was accurate. Although of course it'll still bother me if it isn't. 
> 
> Fic title is from "Water Here" by Bodies of Water. Comments and [reblogs](https://thelightofthingshopedfor.tumblr.com/post/190050356662/these-tangled-waters-that-roil-and-churn) are both wonderful!


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